I’m almost certainly not the only person who is experiencing the present health emergency as a time of acute frustration. “What am I supposed to do?” My upbringing always stressed the importance of responsibility and service to others. Here is a problem that involves a lot of people suffering and experiencing inconvenience. Surely there must be something I can do to help? Instead I am told that I have to stay at home. At my age, according to the government’s instructions, I am supposed to stay there, although I have to confess that I trade on my relatively youthful appearance to take a trip to the supermarket once a week. I do ‘phone round and email friends and neighbours so see how they are, and try to offer what support I can, but it feel this is far too little in relation to what I think I might be able to do. My frustration was placed under scrutiny today, however, by an item I happened to catch by chance on the radio when I came in from the garden.
It is quite remarkable how many people are rising to the challenge of the current situation in impressive ways. If I understood this particular news item correctly, a small restaurant, instead of waiting for custom to return in the usual way, is making meals that it takes out to he needy and housebound. They reckon to be making 1,000 meals a week as a service, supported by free consignments of unsold food from supermarkets. That set me thinking.
Several years ago our then and unlamented Prime Minister David Cameron defended the contraction of state social services under the banner of “austerity” by suggesting that charitable and voluntary action should be filling the space under the slogan of “The Big Society”. His motives were less than pure, and there was little sign at the time of his suggestion eliciting a response. Now, however, it is becoming overwhelmingly evident that the most incredible voluntary activities are taking place in an upsurge of creativity. There is a lesson in this, I’m sure.
Things will not return to “normal” when the current crisis is behind us. A wide range of people will have discovered their own capability and capacity for leadership, and I cannot imagine that the confidence this will have generated will not allow them to slump back into some pre-Covid “normality”. Things will be different in a wide variety of ways, many of which we can not at present imagine. If nothing else, and despite its obviously damaging effects, the current crisis will have empowered a lot of people, and will leave them with the capacity to communicate this. There will indeed be some changes made, and standing where we are we cannot imagine as yet how large those are probably going to be.
Against that background I am sorry to have to admit that the best thing that people of my generation can do is actually to get out of the way. We should stop feeling that everything depends upon us …. it doesn’t. In fact, there are many people better placed than us to exercise the energetic and creative leadership society is going to need. What we need to do is to accept that, and to encourage them to do it.
There is, however, an exception to this. In the area of art I’m just getting going. Don’t stop me now!